As a part of their ongoing efforts to destroy the universe, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva created a small version of the process that may have triggered the Big Bang. The experiment resulted in the highest temperature and densities ever created in a controlled setting. David Evans, one of the researchers, said:

"We are thrilled with the achievement," said Dr Evans.

"This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

"At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma."

Quarks and gluons are sub-atomic particles - some of the building blocks of matter. In the state known as quark-gluon plasma, they are freed of their attraction to one another. This plasma is believed to have existed just after the Big Bang.